web typography

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web safe fonts

The font-family property should hold several font names as a “fallback” system, to ensure maximum compatibility between browsers/operating systems. If the browser does not support the first font, it tries the next font.

Start with the font you want, and end with a generic family, to let the browser pick a similar font in the generic family, if no other fonts are available:

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p {
  font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

custom web fonts

Generically, you can use a custom font using @font-face in your CSS. Here’s a very basic example:

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@font-face {
    font-family: 'YourFontName'; /*a name to be used later*/
    src: url('http://domain.com/fonts/font.ttf'); /*URL to font*/
}

Then, trivially, to use the font on a specific element:

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.classname {
    font-family: 'YourFontName';
}

font formats

  • TrueType Fonts (TTF)

TrueType is a font standard developed in the late 1980s, by Apple and Microsoft. TrueType is the most common font format for both the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

  • OpenType Fonts (OTF)

OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on TrueType, and is a registered trademark of Microsoft. OpenType fonts are used commonly today on the major computer platforms.

  • The Web Open Font Format (WOFF)

WOFF is a font format for use in web pages. It was developed in 2009, and is now a W3C Recommendation. WOFF is essentially OpenType or TrueType with compression and additional metadata. The goal is to support font distribution from a server to a client over a network with bandwidth constraints.

  • The Web Open Font Format (WOFF 2.0)

TrueType/OpenType font that provides better compression than WOFF 1.0.

  • SVG Fonts/Shapes

SVG fonts allow SVG to be used as glyphs when displaying text. The SVG 1.1 specification define a font module that allows the creation of fonts within an SVG document. You can also apply CSS to SVG documents, and the @font-face rule can be applied to text in SVG documents.

  • Embedded OpenType Fonts (EOT)

EOT fonts are a compact form of OpenType fonts designed by Microsoft for use as embedded fonts on web pages.

icon fonts

Icon fonts are fonts that contain symbols and glyphs instead of letters or numbers.

font-face